Brand growth relies on loyal consumers. In fact, repeat business from existing customers generates 65% of most companies’ revenue. Current customers experience less friction in the path to purchase because they know the brand and its products. If they had great previous brand experiences, they expect the same for future purchases.
Customers loyal to brands make purchases 90% more frequently than new customers, partly because companies consistently meeting or exceeding customer expectations create loyal customers. So how can ecommerce retailers meet consumer demands? By incorporating the following tips into their digital brand strategy.
Provide Real-Time Inventory Visibility
Nearly half of all retailers believe enhanced inventory visibility would help them better serve customers and improve the overall customer experience; however, only 38% show basic inventory availability on product pages.
Without an accurate, real-time view of inventory, customers may seek out a different retailer that provides up-to-the-minute updates on product availability, so brands lose out on easy sales. Customers checking inventory levels show a high intent to purchase.
Advertisement
By improving real-time inventory visibility, businesses increase consumer confidence in online shopping. Companies also avoid stockouts. Brand reputation takes a hit when a company has to cancel a customer’s order because items have sold out. In 2021, out-of-stock items resulted in nearly 10% of uncompleted sales, costing retailers $82 billion.
Invest in Search Engine Optimization
Ecommerce retailers also rely on organic search as their second primary source of traffic — it’s responsible for 32% of overall monthly traffic. Brands can improve organic search traffic via search engine optimization (SEO), which:
- Improves website quality;
- Ensures consumers find what they need; and
- Makes websites more authoritative to search engines.
Regularly updating product descriptions improves search results and increases customer engagement. Companies should leverage long-tail and short-tail product descriptions to attract customers and search engines. Well-written SEO product descriptions elevate a company’s ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs) and draw more consumers to their products.
Maintain Rich Product Content
More than 80% of online shoppers rank product content as more important than brand recognition in their purchase decision-making. High-quality product content drives customer trust and cultivates lasting brand loyalty.
Brands should include product images, descriptions, features and specs, and reviews to help customers make a purchase decision. About 95% of consumers read online reviews as they shop, and more than half would pay more for products with great reviews.
When online shoppers find fewer product reviews, they are more likely to leave a product detail page (PDP) or website. Other common pain points for customers include:
- Poor quality or fewer product images;
- Poorly written product descriptions; and
- Lack of product videos.
Rich product content allows consumers to envision themselves using and benefitting from a company’s product. Brands must deliver interactive and immersive content experiences designed to engage and educate. Virtual reality and augmented reality capabilities, 360-degree spin imagery and scale shots set brands apart in highly competitive markets.
Maintaining brand loyalty drives company sales and long-term success. Companies that fail to nurture existing customer relationships damage their bottom line and miss out on future customers. Because 77% of customers would recommend a brand to a friend after a single positive experience, failing to provide a positive customer experience leaves money on the table. To amplify their digital brand strategy, companies must invest in elevating their real-time inventory capabilities, honing their SEO practices and delivering rich product content.
TJ Waldorf is a marketing and sales leader with a proven track record of building new and repeat business by intimately understanding the needs, pains and desires of the customer, and mapping each to a company’s unique value. Currently, he leads 1WorldSync’s marketing, communications and community engagement as VP of Marketing. Prior to this role, Waldorf served as Chief Marketing Officer at a leading-edge infrastructure-as-a-service provider, where he led marketing, inside sales and customer success functions. Prior to that, Waldorf led sales and marketing for managed private cloud provider SingleHop, a Battery Ventures-backed company.
